But the books are very different. Console Wars is structured around a human history, and the author has either conducted extensive interviews or has fabricated an astonishing amount of material. Before reading Console Wars, “Sega” and “Nintendo” were just brands and machines: I grew to appreciate them as collections of people, with dreams and fears, armies that fought for my amusement. On his twitter feed earlier this year Blake Harris posted this, “There’s No Such Thing as Nintendo,” and this I think sums up the genius of Console Wars: using the messaging of pop brands to understand the human excitement, ambition, and struggle in the hidden real world.

Even though Console Wars primary follows Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinski, Nintendo is discussed in more depth in Blake’s book than Ryan’s! Indeed, a free postscript that Blake wrote for the Huffington Post arguably contains more about Nintendo’s inner workings than the whole of Ryan’s book.

Ryan’s work is also thematically inconsistent. Super Mario was published in 2012, just as gaming was entering its current culture war. It’s obvious the last few chapters of the book were written in that milleu, because only at the end of the book are the sort of faux-sociological explorations of sexism introduced. Console Wars, on the other hand, has a unity of tone and a real-life beginning which book-ends the real-life end. There’s an irony here: Ryan applauds what he imagines to be Nintendo’s efforts at avoiding the “Comic-Con” crowd: Harris wrote this a panel of the Nintendo and Sega leadership at Comic-Con.

There are bits of sarcasm and bite to his voice which are all-too common among the smug pop-culture journalist crowd, and there were times when it got to be a little much. Skip the parentheticals, and you’ll manage to dodge most of that (I seem to have picked a little something up from this book after all. Sorry, Jeff).